Earphones are increasingly used by professionals and consumers for voice communications and music listening. The benefits for voice communications and music listener are to enhance audio signal integrity, increase intelligibility of voice communication, voice messages and improve music quality. One disadvantage of earphones is that the user is sonically impaired from their environment. If the user, while listening to music, wishes to interact with people in their immediate physical environment, they are generally required to manually stop playback of audio content on the mobile device and remove the earphone(s). Such a manual action may be difficult to do in a timely manner, resulting in missed sound or conversational information.
A need thus exists to enhance awareness of audible sounds in the environment with respect to the sonically impaired user.